Desert King, Doctor Daddy

These people saw the money flowing into his country, and the life it could provide, and wanted some of it for themselves, but their arrival was putting stresses on basic infrastructure like hospitals and clinics. This, in itself, was causing difficulties and unrest, something Yusef wanted to put a stop to as early as possible. He knew the tribal women made the decisions for the family, and that it would take someone special to help them settle comfortably in his land. He’d suspected, from the first time he’d heard of this women’s centre in Sydney that the woman who ran it might be the person he was seeking.

‘You are committed, but your staff? Do they also feel as you do?’

She smiled at him, and again it seemed as if a light had gone on behind the fine, pale skin of her face, illuminating all the tiny freckles so she shone like an oil lamp in the desert darkness. Something shifted in his chest, as if his heart had tugged at its moorings, but he knew such things didn’t happen—a momentary fibrillation, nothing more. Stress, no doubt, brought on by the task that lay ahead of him.

‘I could walk out of here tomorrow and nothing would change,’ she assured him proudly. ‘that is probably my greatest achievement. Although everyone likes to believe he or she is indispensable, it’s certainly not the case here. My staff believe, as I do, that we must treat the women who come here without judging them in any way, and that we must be sensitive to their cultural beliefs and customs and as far as possible always act in ways that won’t offend them.’

She paused then gave a rueful laugh.

‘oh, we make mistakes, and sometimes we let our feelings show—I must have today for you to have picked up on my anxiety when I examined Aisha. But generally we manage and the women have come to trust us.’

‘Except when it comes to a Caesarean birth?’

She gave a little shrug.

‘You’re right. No matter how hard we try to convince them that they can have more children after a Caesarean, they don’t believe us.’

She sighed.

‘There’s no perfect world.’

Yusef took a deep breath, thinking about all she had covered in not so many words. He knew the trauma many women suffered in the refugee camps. Of course this woman—Gemma Murray—would feel their pain, yet she continued to do her job.

He now reflected on the other thing she’d said. She could leave tomorrow and the centre’s work would continue.

Was this true?

What was he thinking now? Gemma wondered.

Had she made a fool of herself talking about the centre the way she had?

Been too emotional?

Gemma watched the man across the table, his gaze fixed on some point beyond her shoulder, obviously thinking but about what she had no clue for his face was totally impassive now.

‘Would you leave tomorrow?’ he asked.

Chapter Two

THE question was so totally unexpected, Gemma could only stare at him, and before she could formulate a reply, he spoke again.

‘And your second house, would you be equally confident leaving it?’

She could feel the frown deepening on her forehead but still couldn’t answer, although she knew she had to—knew there was something important going on here, even if she didn’t understand it.

Think, brain, think!

‘None of your money has gone into the second house,’ she said, then realised she’d sounded far too defensive and tried to laugh it off. ‘Sorry, but I wasn’t sure you knew about it.’

He had a stillness about him, this man who had virtually saved their service, and perhaps because he’d let emotion show earlier and had regretted it, his face was now impossible to read.

‘I know of its existence,’ her visitor said, ‘but not of how it came to be. It seems to me you had enough—is the expression “on your plate”?—without taking on more waifs and strays.’

Was it his stillness that made her fidget with the sugar basin on the table? She wasn’t usually a fidget, but pushing it around and rearranging the salt and pepper grinders seemed to ease her tension as she tried to explain. Actually, anything was preferable to looking at him as she answered, because looking at him was causing really weird sensations in her body.

She was finding him attractive?

Surely not, although he was undeniably attractive…

She moved the pepper grinder back to where it had been and concentrated on business.

‘The sign on our front door, although fairly discreet, does say Women’s Centre, and with our inner-city position, I suppose it was inevitable that some women who were not immigrants would turn up here. Not often, in the beginning, but one in particular, an insulin-dependent diabetic, began to come regularly, and sometimes bring a friend, or recommend us to another woman.’

‘These are women of the streets you talk of?’

The pepper grinder was in the wrong place again and Gemma shifted it, then looked up at her questioner.

‘I don’t know about your country—or even what country you call home—but here a lot of people with mental health problems or addictions end up living on the streets. The government, church and charity organisations all do what they can, and homeless people have the same access to free hospital care at public hospitals, but…’

What did she not want to say? Yusef watched her restless hands, moving things on the table, the tiny golden freckles on her long slim fingers fascinating him. Everything about this woman was fascinating him, which in itself should be a warning to find someone else. The last complication he needed in his life right now was to be attracted to a woman, particularly one he was intending to employ.

Yet his eyes kept straying to her vivid hair, her freckled skin, the way her pale lips moved as she spoke—which she was doing now so he should concentrate.

‘Sometimes there is an element of judgement in the treatment of these women, or if not judgement then a genuine desire to help them, but to help them by changing their way of life.’

She tucked her hands onto her lap where they couldn’t fiddle—and he could no longer see them—and looked directly at him.

‘I am not saying this is a bad thing. I am not saying that organisations dedicated to helping these people shouldn’t exist, it is just that sometimes all they want is a diagnosis of some small problem and, where necessary, a prescription. Sometimes they don’t want to be helped in other ways, or cured of an addiction, or to change their lives.’

Was she so naïve? Could she not see that a lot of the organisations set up for these people were funded on the basis that they did attempt to change lives? It was their duty to at least try!

‘But surely a drug addict should be helped to fight his or her addiction?’ he asked, and watched her closely, trying to fathom where her totally non-judgemental attitude had come from. Trying to focus on the discussion they were having, not on the effect she was having on his body.

‘Of course,’ she said, ‘and as I said there are plenty of places willing to help in that way. If someone asks for that kind of help we refer them on, but our—our charter, I suppose you could say, is purely medical. We are a medical centre for people who are intimidated by the public health system, or for some other reason do not wish to use it.’

‘And for that you bought a house?’

Defiance flashed in the pale eyes. Would desire heat them in the same way?

Yusef groaned, but inwardly. It had to be because he’d been so busy these last six months, too busy for anything but the briefest social encounters with women, that his body was behaving the way it was. Not only his body, but his mind, it seemed.

‘I live in that house,’ she said, the words carrying an icy edge. ‘It is my home. And if I choose to turn the upstairs into a flat and the downstairs into a surgery, then that is my business.’

Ah, so she had the fire that supposedly accompanied the colour of her hair—fire and ice…

‘I am not criticising. I think it is admirable, and that brings me back to my original question. Could you walk away from these services you have set up?’

Gemma studied him, suspicion coiling in her stomach, keeping company with the other stuff that was happening there every time she looked at this man. It couldn’t be attraction, for all that he was the best looking man she’d ever seen. She didn’t do attraction any more. Attraction led to such chaos it was easier to avoid it.

‘Why are you asking that?’ she demanded, probably too demandingly but he had her rattled. ‘Are you implying that if I left, the staff I’ve trained, the staff who work here because they hold the same beliefs I do, would turn the services into something else? And if so, would you withdraw your funding? Is that where your questions are leading?’

Fire! It was sparking from her now, but he had to concentrate—had to think whether now was the time to talk of the new venture. Probably not. She was too suspicious of him.

‘You may be sure of my contributions to your service continuing, even increasing,’ he said. ‘Though perhaps now would be a good time for me to look at more of the facilities than the treatment room you used for Aisha. Perhaps you can tell me what else is needed.’ He stood up, relieved to get off the uncomfortable and not totally, he suspected, clean chair. ‘Apart,’ he added with a smile, ‘from some new kitchen furniture.’

Gemma was sorry he’d smiled. She’d been okay denying the attraction right up until then, but the smile sneaked through a crack in her defences and weakened not only her resistance but the muscles in her chest so she found it hard to breathe normally and had to remind herself—in, out, in, out!

‘A tour, good,’ she said, standing up and all but running out of the kitchen—anything to escape the man’s presence. Although he’d still be with her, but surely explaining the use to which they put the various rooms would take her mind off the attraction.

She led him through the ground-floor rooms first, then up the stairs to where she’d had two small bedrooms altered to make a larger meeting room.

‘We have playgroups for the children here,’ she said. ‘It’s wonderful to see them all singing nursery rhymes in English, and chattering to each other in a medley of languages that they all seem to understand. In the beginning the mothers usually come along as well, but as they grow in confidence themselves, they will leave the children and go off for a coffee. And as they get to know each other, they make arrangements to meet at places other than the centre, in a park at weekends, with their extended families. The centre has become a kind of cultural crossroads, and that pleases me enormously.’

Talking about the centre was good—Gemma was so wholehearted about what the place had achieved that she didn’t have to pretend enthusiasm. Neither did she have to look at her visitor—well, not more than an occasional glance.

‘And the other rooms on this floor?’

‘A bedroom and bathroom for on-duty staff. I was on-duty last night and although I only live next door I do a night shift here once a month.’

Now she did look at him.

‘We need a doctor on hand for obstetric emergencies. It doesn’t seem to matter how careful we are in our antenatal clinics and how often we take pregnant women to the hospital and show them the birthing suites, nurseries and maternity wards, some, like Aisha, will not go to a hospital.’

He nodded as if he understood, and the haunted look was back on his face, as if he’d seen things in hospitals in other places that he’d rather not remember.

She wanted to reach out and touch his arm, to offer comfort, though for what she didn’t know, but she shrugged off the silly notion as he evidently shrugged off his memories, asking, ‘And is there someone on duty in the other house?’

Gemma shook her head.

‘The other house is strictly week-days, day and evening appointments although most of the patients who attend don’t bother with appointments. From time to time, someone turns up here late at night or on a weekend, but it’s rare. I think the women who use the service consider it a bit special so they are reluctant to abuse it.’

She had no sooner finished speaking than the doorbell peeled, echoing through the empty rooms downstairs.

‘Surely not another emergency birth,’ she muttered as she headed down the steps. She could hear her visitor coming down behind her but her focus was on the door, beyond which she could hear shrill wails.

Gemma flung open the door to find two women grappling on the doorstep. The air smelt of old wet wool and blood, which was liberally splattered over both of them. As Gemma moved closer she thought she saw the flash of a knife, then she was thrust aside by a powerful arm and the man who’d followed her stepped past her, putting his arms around one of the women and lifting her cleanly off the step.

‘Drop the knife,’ he ordered, not loudly but with such authority the woman in his arms obeyed instantly, a battered, rusty carving knife falling to the ground.

Gemma scooped it up and shoved it behind the umbrella stand in the foyer, temporarily out of harm’s way, then she turned her attention to the woman who had had collapsed onto the floor just inside the door—Jackie, one of the older women who used the medical services at the house next door.

The sheikh—after his authoritative intervention Gemma found herself thinking of him that way—was talking soothingly to the attacker, whom he had settled into a chair.

‘What happened, Jackie?’ Gemma asked as she bent over the woman on the floor. Jackie didn’t reply but Gemma could see blood oozing between the fingers of her left hand, which were clasped tightly on her upper right arm.

‘Touched my things. She touched my things,’ Bristow, the second woman, roared from the other side of the room.

‘Jackie wouldn’t do that,’ Gemma said, turning to face the attacker, who was huddled in the chair, her damp and wrinkled layers of cardigans and coats making her look like an insect that had sunk back into its chrysalis. The sheikh stood beside her, perhaps perplexed by her retreat. ‘She’s your friend,’ Gemma added. ‘She knows not to touch your things.’

Gemma helped Jackie back to her feet and half carried her into the treatment room, the sheikh joining her and lifting Jackie onto the examination table. This time the patient didn’t object and Gemma was able to unfasten Jackie’s fingers and move enough clothing to see the long, deep gash in Jackie’s arm.

‘She needs to go to hospital—it’s deep, there could be nerve and ligament damage.’

The sheikh was right behind her, and Gemma turned, puzzled by his instant diagnosis.

‘I told you I was a surgeon,’ he said, but his voice was drowned out by Jackie’s cries.

‘No hospital, no hospital. I can’t go to hospital,’ she wailed, and Gemma turned towards the visitor.

‘There are reasons,’ she said quietly.

‘Then I’ll do it,’ he said. ‘You can get me what I need—I assume you have sutures—and assist me. Her friend will be all right?’

Gemma didn’t know how to answer that. She’d known Bristow for over a year and never seen any signs of violence, but now this had happened, who knew what the little woman might do?

‘You’ll do it yourself?’

It didn’t seem right. The man was a benefactor—not to mention a sheikh and apparently a highness, although that really wasn’t the point. Surely sheikhs had as much right to be surgeons as anyone else. It just seemed…unseemly somehow that the man in the beautiful suit should be—

‘Shall I look for myself to see what’s available?’ Curt words! The man had tied his handkerchief around Jackie’s arm to slow the bleeding and was obviously getting impatient.

Gemma hurried towards the cabinet. Jackie’s tremors were getting stronger and though a quick glance had shown that Bristow was still sitting on a chair in the foyer; if she disappeared further into her coat she’d be nothing but a bundle of rags. And, Gemma knew from experience, she wouldn’t emerge to answer questions or even move from the chair for some considerable time.

‘Here,’ she told the visitor, unlocking the cabinet and piling all she thought he might need onto a tray. Local anaesthetic, a bottle of antiseptic liquid, swabs, sutures and dressings joined a couple of pairs of gloves.

‘A gown—there must be a plain gown,’ she muttered, but as hard as she flipped through the folded gowns on the bottom shelf there was nothing that was really suitable for such a man.

‘Anything will do,’ he said, calling to her from the sink at the corner where he’d stripped off his coat, rolled up his shirtsleeves and was now scrubbing his hands.

‘It’ll have to,’ Gemma muttered to herself but the largest gown she could find, one she often wore herself, had bunny rabbits hopping gleefully all over it.

Yusef grimaced as she held it up for him but, wanting to save his shirt and suit trousers, he slid his arms into it and let her tie it behind him, concentrating on the job ahead, not his awareness of the woman who’d slipped her arms around him to get the ties. He snapped on gloves and returned to his patient. She was trembling, but whether from nerves or from pain or from a pre-existing condition he had no idea.

All he could do was try to soothe her, talking quietly to her, knowing that the sound of a human voice was sometimes more important than the words it spoke. The gash on her arm was deep and he worried that it might be infected.

‘Will she take a course of antibiotics?’ He turned so he could quietly ask the question of Gemma without upsetting the patient.

‘Probably not, but if we give her a tetanus and antibiotic shot today, that might hold off any infection. We can try to get her back to have the stitches removed.’

Yusef understood what she was saying—that these women might not return to the surgery for months, but if Jackie could be convinced to come back for some reason then they might be able to give her more antibiotics.

He swabbed and stitched, talking all the time, feeling Jackie growing calmer under his prattle. And it was prattle. He talked of a wound he’d had as a young boy, out in the desert, a wound one of the women of the family had stitched with sewing thread. Then, for good measure, he told her of the infection that had set in and how his father had told him he’d lose his arm if he didn’t take some medicine. This last part wasn’t quite true, and he read disbelief in Gemma’s eyes, but she seemed to understand his motive and went along with it.

But having Gemma so close to him was accelerating all the physical impulses his body was experiencing, and adding to his belief that taking this woman to his country might not be the best of ideas.

Except that she was so exactly what he needed! What the service he hoped to set up needed.

‘I bet there’s no infection scar,’ she muttered to him, as they left Jackie, wound stitched and dressed, on the table and went to wash their hands.

‘You’re right, although the sewing thread part was true. In point of fact, my father was in the city at the time, but when he heard, he sent a helicopter and had me flown out, flying in a surgeon from Singapore of all places to ensure the wound would heal as cleanly as possible.’

Gemma shook her head. The man must inhabit a world so different from her own it seemed like another planet. But other planet or not, he had been extremely helpful, and still could be.

‘If you could help Jackie off the table, maybe offer her a cup of tea and something to eat, I’ll talk to Bristow.’

He looked startled, as if no one had ever asked him to make tea for a street-person before, but then he smiled and crossed to Jackie’s side, talking again—more stories?

Gemma found Bristow still huddled in the chair in the foyer. She squatted beside her.

‘Talk to me,’ she said, her voice quietly persuasive. ‘Tell me what happened.’

Bristow’s head inched out of the coat.

‘Medicine, she tried to take my medicine. She take that and she die. I tell her she die.’

Tears began rolling down Bristow’s cheeks, her rheumy eyes reddened by her anguish.

‘You’re right,’ Gemma told her, patting the bundle of rags. ‘It’s okay. I understand and Jackie’s going to be okay. Now, seeing you’re here, let’s go into my office and I’ll check you out.’

‘I need my knife.’

Gemma hesitated, then pulled the knife from behind the umbrella stand.

‘I can’t give it back to you,’ she said gently, touching Bristow on the cheek. ‘You must know that.’

Bristow’s head dropped deeper into the bundle of coats and rags and Gemma felt so guilty she added, ‘You don’t really need it, Bristow. Jackie won’t touch your things again.’

‘My things outside. Must get my things.’ Bristow had hopped off the chair and was bouncing up and down, her agitation increasing every second.

Gemma ushered her out, knowing the elderly woman wouldn’t be settled until she had her old pram full of plastic bags of treasure with her again. They retrieved the pram, then she led Bristow into a consulting room and talked quietly to her, although she’d have loved to have been a fly on the wall in the kitchen. All she could hear was the faint murmur of the man’s voice, but his presence in the old house unsettled Gemma as she talked Bristow out of her agitation, checked her blood sugar and assured her she’d done the right thing in not letting Jackie touch her insulin but gently chiding her for using the knife.

‘She had to understand,’ Bristow said, and Gemma shrugged, not wanting to agitate the woman again. Bristow was right, and even if her methods were a little extreme, Gemma was reasonably sure that Jackie would never touch the insulin again.

‘So maybe now we can talk.’

Gemma shut the door on the ill-assorted pair and turned to find her visitor right behind her. He’d taken off the happy, hopping bunny wrap but hadn’t put on his jacket, which he’d hung on the knob at the bottom of the stair banister. He’d also removed his tie and draped it over his coat, so, with his shirtsleeves rolled up and his collar unbuttoned, he looked a very different man from the one she’d met earlier that morning.

An even more attractive man!

And given the attraction, she should be seeing him off the premises as quickly as possible, but politeness—and his promise of even more donations—prevailed.

‘I’m sorry we keep being interrupted, but it’s lunchtime and Beth’s just arrived to relieve me. Can I offer you some lunch? We can go up to my flat where we won’t be disturbed, or do you have to be somewhere?’

Yusef thought of all the business he’d hoped to get done after his morning meeting at the centre, and all the reasons he shouldn’t be spending more time in this woman’s company, but so far he’d achieved nothing of his main purpose. He had to spend more time with her.

‘Lunch sounds good but can’t I take you somewhere?’

‘Tempting though that sounds, I think we should get down to business and we can hardly do that in a restaurant. Besides, I’m sure you’re already way beyond the time you scheduled for this meeting, so it will be quicker and easier to eat next door.’

She ducked into one of the consulting rooms to speak to someone, then returned, a bundle of keys dangling from her fingers.

‘Beth’s another of the doctors on staff. She’s done the O and G short course and hopes to go back to study next year to do a full specialty course. We’ve been lucky to get so many good quality staff, especially as the pay isn’t nearly as much as they’d earn in private practice.’

She led the way outside, Yusef pausing to grab his jacket and tie, then down the steps and up the steps of the adjacent house, unlocking the bright red front door.

‘The steps are a nuisance but we’ve a ramp at the side entrance next door, which makes it easier for mothers with prams and strollers.’

Was she nervous that her conversation sounded like anxious chatter? Yusef found himself wishing he knew her better so he could judge this reaction.